Am Sonntag, den 21.02.2010, 17:56 +0100 schrieb Nils-Christoph Fiedler: > hej folks, > > i have a little question about economy in translating software. > busy as a bee, we're translating every single line / string of software. > but isn't there a possibility, technically, to just write a big library > or a "super-giga-master.po"-file, which includes all of the strings, > instead of translating equal strings in different software again and > again? i mean even in one file some terms appear more than one time and > e.g. the strings "File", "Edit" or "View" also occur in nearly every > lib. i guess we could save a hundreds of hours of translating. > so this might be a stupid question from a translator to a developer, but > isn't it possible, that strings in software refer to one big catalog, > instead of one .po for every single application? > > kind regards, > nils
Hi Nils, if you're using advanced translation tools like Poedit or Gtranslator, you *have* such a big global database. For example in Poedit, open the preferences dialog and click on the "translation memory" tab. Here you can fill the translation database with the desired content. The steps should be self-explaining. After you have created the database (be patient, this may take a while), you open a *.po file as usual. Right-click on an entry in the upper pane, and you get some recommendations for the translation. Note, you have to assign the language codes to the document, in your case "Low German". There's a second way to use the automatic translation. Click on "Catalog → Automatically translate using TM". But this can cause that a lot of strings will be filled in with nonsense. In this case Poedit is as stupid as a fly swat, the "fuzzy logic" doesn't work really perfect. However, if it fills in the strings automatically, they will be marked as fuzzy by default. In my mind, to provide a global translation database within the installed system, where applications can get their translations from, is no good idea. It would be too difficult to distinguish between translations for certain applications. For example, the translation for "Knight" is in German not the same for both Chess and Card games. That's why we should keep our application-wise translations. Cheers, Mario _______________________________________________ gnome-i18n mailing list gnome-i18n@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-i18n
